I’ve run 32,224 tests during one month to find out which caching plugin makes your website faster. I tested W3 Total Cache and WP Super Cache plugins. They are the two best well-known free caching plugins that WordPress users highly recommend using to make your website faster.

And also I compared them to the caching solution that I currently use – Sucuri Cloud WAF (website application firewall). It’s actually a part of a website security solution (the best one that I know), and it also includes a caching level that speeds up your site.

Intro

My initial purpose of this research was to find out which one of W3 Total Cache or WP Super Cache is the best WordPress caching plugins that you can use for free. I compared the free versions of the both caching plugins.

Since for researchasahobby.com I use a website firewall which is not only a great security product provided by Sucuri, but also a solution that improves the speed of my website, I added this product to my research as well. But keep in mind, that this solution (Sucuri Firewall, Cloud WAF) is not free, although very affordable.

By the way, Sucuri is my best choice of affordable website security solutions (you can read more about it in this in-depth comparison). It’s nice that apart from security I get more speed.

Okay, that was the short introduction to show you why I selected these caching options to compare.

The settings that I used for the free WordPress caching plugins (the settings are typical and you can use them too).

In the next section I explain the details of my research methodology.

By the way, here’s a disclosure: There are some affiliate links on this page for the products which I mention in this post (website security products by Sucuri; recommended hosting companies). In other words, I get paid if you click on the links and make a purchase. All such links open in new window/tab; no software/program will be installed to your computer. (This is a standard notice required by affiliate programs terms.) Please note that I mention the products not as an advertisement, but as my recommendation.

How I tested the speed of the websites with the best WordPress caching plugins

What websites I used for this experiment and how I tested their speed

I created four identical WordPress websites and filled them with dummy content:

Each website contained one thousand posts, one thousand pages, two thousand comments which I generated and posted with a software.

Each website had 25 plugins installed.

As regards hosting, I used one of the popular hosts, but not one of the best hosts. I chose not a very good hosting on purpose to find out if using the best WordPress caching plugins can help to improve website speed in this situation.

The four websites had different caching plugins and solutions that I tested:

So, the tests for the four websites with the caching solutions were run every 20 minutes for 28 days from two locations (East and West of US).

Every day during the testing I received a report by email with the data how fast my websites with different caching solutions performed. You can see the screenshots of these reports below in this post.

The settings for WP Super Cache plugin

I left all settings by default or set them as recommended in this caching plugin settings. You can see below the screenshots for details.

At the same time, the paid security solution Sucuri Firewall (Cloud WAF) which includes a caching option in conjunction with a free version of W3 Total Cache plugin is the strong winner of this contest.

To compare the monthly average speed of the websites using these caching options you can see the following chart as well:

And Sucuri WAF (Website Firewall, Cloud WAF) is the winner in practically all tests. Moreover, when a hosting becomes unstable (large amplitude of speed fluctuations on the second half of the chart), Cloud WAF helped to make a website faster much more efficient than free caching plugins.

And here’s one more chart to look at the difference between different caching options throughout the 28 days of testing:

The screenshots of the daily monitoring reports on websites performance with the tested caching plugins and solutions are here:

It’s clearly seen that W3 Total Cache plugin (free version) beats Super Cache plugin (free version) by about 17% according to the tests.

Caching solutions which is composed of a free version of W3 total Cache and the caching layer included in the security product Sucuri Firewall (Cloud WAF) beats hands down free versions of the caching plugins (by at least 35% in website speed).

Don’t freak out about the caching plugins settings. If you are not a technical guru, then just set up almost everything by default and as recommended by plugins’ developers (I have screenshots with the settings in this post) and there you go! Also, you’re welcome to read this in-depth article where I explain W3 Total Cache settings and recommend what settings are better to use and when.

Update from March 2017: Sucuri has run their tests to compare a website performance with and without Sucuri WAF, as well as with and without a caching plugin. Have a look at the post and particularly this result chart.

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I hope you enjoyed the article! You can read my free researches on resources and tools for bloggers and small business owners on this website. By the way, if we haven't met before - my name is Michael Bely.

Hey Collin, Thanks for your question. Initially my idea was to test and compare just two caching plugins which are free – W3TC and WP Super Cache. But since I use Sucuri Firewall myself I decided to include it to the research too. But as I mention in my blog post, Sucuri WAF is not a caching solution in the first place, but a security solution.

Hi Dave, There are many caching solutions available out there. I have not tried this one. The purpose of the article was to compare the two most well-known caching plugins. However, I think all caching plugins deliver similar speed improvement in general. But in some particular cases one caching solution may be better than another. For example, some months ago I worked on a speed optimization of a WordPress site. It was not a simple case. I played with different caching plugins and combinations for a couple of days to get the best-tuned results for faster starting of page rendering for a new visitor (not a repeated view). Simply by test-and-trial approach I could find the most efficient combination (including css minification, synchronization, script parsing deferring etc) in that particular case. So if you want to fine-tune your site performance, you need to test your website individually with different caching options. But by default I prefer W3TC.

Just a short question. If I understood well the functionality of W3 Total Cache is whither than WP Super Cache. So to make the compare fair I think you should add also a plugin like Autoptimise (and probably some more) to the WP Super Cache case. Or did you take this into consideration?

As a beginner in WP I ended up with the combination of WP Super Cache, Autoptimise and Remove Query Strings From Static Resources. I think it is good enough as a start since I read here and there that the configuration of W3 Total Cache is not always obvious for a beginner.

Hi Attila, Thanks for a thoughtful comment. My idea of writing this article was to compare just the two most well-known free caching plugins. Plus I added one commercial caching solution (Sucuri WAF) that I’m using. Although the latter is a security solution, not just a caching layer. There are many other caching plugins. I did not have intention to compare them all. W3TC looks more complicated in settings, but it’s an advantage IMO, because other caching plugins which don’t have some settings ignore some features. If a combination of some caching/optimization plugins work better for you, that’s great.

Hi Michael, another great post, thanks! Can you please share W3TC settings that you used in your tests? I would like to try it and compare the results with WP Rocket that I am currently using. Also, I am surprised that Sucuri WAF made so much difference… are you using Basic, Pro, or Business subscription with Sucuri WAF? I thought that if you get benefits of CDN only when you subscribe to Sucuri Website Security Platform product (starts at $199/year) but not with Sucuri WAF… am I wrong here?

I’m using just Sucuri WAF the most basic plan (about $10/mo). I was also a bit surprised (in a positive way) to see a significantly good performance improvement. Although Sucuri mentions this feature and have article(s) in their knowledge base, they don’t advertise it a lot on the main page, focusing on security first of all.

I am a bit confused with your tests/results in this article. Why would W3TC make any difference when you are using Sucuri CloudProxy? The W3TC caching (re serving content from your site) will only make difference in 2 situations: CloudProxy cache update (should occur only once every 3 hours if you use their default caching options) and in the event of firewall bypass which shouldn’t really occur if you blacklist all HTTP traffic except from CloudProxy nodes. Am I missing something here? Did you try on a forth website disabling W3TC and comparing results Sucuri+W3TC with Sucuri only? I don’t think you will/should notice the difference.

My Sucuri WAF caching settings are default. And yes, as Sucuri recommends, I block all http traffic allowing access only from specific nodes provided by Sucuri.

Anyway, I have not run tests to compare Sucuri+W3TC with Sucuri only myself, but you can have a look at this post and particularly this chart from the post from Sucuri’s blog. Their tests show that using a Caching plugin + Sucuri WAF is more advantageous than using Sucuri WAF only.

Well, the chart actually confirms my expectations that the effect of caching plugin with Sucuri is minimal. With 20 concurrent connections the increase in number of transactions (with cache plugin) is only 1% (2302 vs. 2279). The difference of 3% vs. 5% processor use is negligible unless you run a lot of sites on your server/VPS. I don’t think the results justifies having one extra plugin in your WordPress installation.